Thursday, April 24, 2008

Another Social Ad That Sucks

Social ads in Ukraine rarely carry strong selling points.

Still convinced that you’ll be better-off in a foreign country? Illegal labor migration, illegal employment abroad means children left without parental guidance, inhuman living conditions, forced and unpaid labor, human trafficking for labor and sexual exploitation. Don’t look at employment abroad through rose-colored glasses. Work in Ukraine. Keep up the good old human values: the parents, the kids, and the Fatherland. You deserve a decent job and a decent pay in Ukraine.

Decent pay…hmmm. You mean, like, $200-300 a month? Is that enough to support the parents, the kids, and the Fatherland?

Forget it, say millions of skilled blue-collar and thousands of white-collar Ukrainians who work abroad. Known as zarobitchany, they sent an estimated $8.4 billion worth of remittances to Ukraine in 2006, a figure twice as high as the country’s FDI for that year.

8 comments:

elmer
said...

OK, Taras, that is a really, really bad ad.

The oligarchs/politicians in Ukraine suck up all the money, have several HUGE mansions each, drive expensive Bentleys and Mercedes, plus yachts and jets - and they really expect people to fall for this ad? It's obscene.

So let's look at some pictures.

http://picasaweb.google.com/dezhnyuk/

This is the picture web site of a guy that I know, who is from Ukraine.

He was a Baptist minister, now studying to be an Episcopalian priest.

You can see pictures of his house in Tulsa, plus pictures from Ukraine where he grew up, including captions.

(Go to the "Ukraine As It Is" group of pictures. He also has pictures of Mr. Vasyl Nechepa's concerts at the State Capitol in Oklahoma, attended by many Oklahoma officials, and at a Baptist church in Oklahoma.)

He also was an election monitor in Georgia, and also in Ukraine. There are groups of pictures there as well.

My favorite ones are the pictures of former commie headquarters in his town, where they used to post anti-commie slogans, plus the story about making a call to the US from local KGB headquarters.

The fields where he used to play soccer as a kid are now overgrown - too many kids have video games in Ukraine.

You can judge for yourself how reliable the ad is.

Oh, by the way, he also has a blog, but it's in Russian, though he speaks perfect Ukrainian.

There is danger for some people, and indeed danger for some girls who get tricked, and then get captured as sex slaves.

But guess what? Here's an example of what happens in Ukraine.

When Vlad, the guy who sold Katia into sex slavery in Turkey, got caught and was convicted in a Ukrainian court - HE GOT OFF!!!!

I was brutally shocked. "Olga," a rooskie fat pig of a woman, was the one who got girls into a van, by trickery, and then was paid by another rooskie in Turkey, where the girls were taken into sex slavery.

Yushchenko talks about corruption - and then protects Firtash.

Corruption in the courts is killing Ukraine.

Katia's story was told in the US by the Public Broadcasting System, on a program called "Frontline."

Here's the link:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/slaves/map/vlad.html

So for all this, Ukrainians are not supposed to seek jobs and a better life elsewhere?

What are Yanukovych and Zviahilsky offering people, other than getting blown up in dangerous coal mines?

And then Zviahilsky, the little fat pig, pretends he doesn't know who owns the mine.

Many Ukrainians who spent most of their adult lives in the USSR and then immigrated to the US speak Russian. That, as you pointed out, doesn’t make them anti-Ukrainian a priori.

The fourth wave of immigration can be an asset to the Ukrainian American community if you reach out to them.

Likewise, it would be unfair to profile Russians as the people who run the sex slave trade because there no such ethnic prevalence seems to be the case.

Judging by news reports, in addition to Russians, one can also find Ukrainians as well as nationals of other FSU countries in charge of human trafficking rings. They all get away with it if they have the money to bribe their way out of jail.

Thank you for the PBS link. I’d trade Ukraine’s entire body politic for every girl like Katya, who couldn’t find that “decent job” the ad talks about.

Taras, Wow! I work with Ukrainian women doing domestic work in Italy and California and I am very interested to know if you have any other "social ads" that you would be willing to share with me either by posting it on the blog or letting me know how I can email you directly. I am writing a dissertation and that would be a big help.

Also, does anyone have any idea how I can get a copy of Tymoshenko's documentary "Mother and Step Mother" or even just clips of it off the web? (I live in California.) Apparently Tymoshenko walked the streets of Naples interviewing Ukrainian domestic workers. Should be interesting. Thanks!